Policies & Constraints

A new home for the Coupa Supply Chain documentation

Starting with Supply Chain 42, our documentation will be located on Coupa Compass. The help here will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future, but will no longer be updated. If you need a Compass user account, contact your company’s Designated Support Contact (DSC).

You can access new and updated Supply Chain documentation in the following location on Compass:

https://compass.coupa.com/en-us/products/supply-chain-design-and-planning

Policies & Constraints

You can optionally define the production, sourcing, transportation and inventory policies for your model. You can use a basic method to create policies directly from various DDM tables, or you can apply an advanced method that lets you set the capabilities and costs for each of the policy types.

There are three types of policy generation:

Do not generate Policies & Constraints – No policies or flow constraints will be generated in your model.
Basic Policy & Constraint generation – You select the DDM table(s) to use as the source of your policies and constraints, and whether or not to create flow constraints.
Advanced Policy & Constraint generation – For each of the policy types, you determine whether or not to generate the policies. If you are generating policies, you select the source of the policy data, use rules to control how policies are derived, and identify how costs are determined for the policies.

If you have made selections for either Basic Policy & Constraint generation or Advanced Policy & Constraint generation, and you change the type of policy generation, all current settings for the policy & constraint generation will be discarded. You are prompted to confirm this action. Click Continue to discard the current settings, or Cancel if you want to keep the current policy & constraint generation method and settings.

Do not generate policies & constraints

Do not generate Policies & Constraints – No policies (production, sourcing, transportation or inventory) are generated for the model. There are also no flow constraints generated.

Basic policy & constraint generation

Basic policy & constraint generation enables you to select the DDM source table(s) from which production, sourcing, transportation and inventory policies are derived for your model. You can also optionally generate flow constraints using the DDM source.

Using basic policy & constraint generation

Click on the Policies & Constraints node. By default, "Do not generate Policies & Constraints" is selected.
Select Basic Policy & Constraint Generation. Use the dropdown list to determine the DDM table(s) to generate policies (sourcing, production, transportation, inventory). Select one of the following:
- Orders Full – Policies are created based on the source, destination and product values in the orders_full table.
- Shipments Full – Policies are created based on the source, destination and product values in the shipment_full table.
- DDM Policies tables – Policies are created based on the data in specific tables within the DDM. These tables are production_policies, sourcing_policies, inventory_policies, shipment_lanes.
If you want to generate flow constraints based on the transactional data, turn on the Generate Constraints switch.
If your Transaction Table is Orders Full, Flow Constraints are generated based on unique combinations of Source-Destination-Product.
If your Transaction Table is Shipments Full, Flow Constraints are generated based on unique combinations of Source-Destination-Product-Mode.
In both cases, the Constraint Value in the generated record is the sum of all Quantity values for the orders or shipments with that specific combination. The Constraint Type is not set, which means the constraint will default to Min unless you update the column value.
If you turn off the switch, no flow constraints are generated.

Advanced policy & constraint generation

Advanced policy & constraint generation enables you to do the following:

Determine whether or not you want to generate policies for each of the various policy types. By default, policies are generated when you select "Advanced Policy and Constraints generation".
Select the source of the policies from a set of DDM tables.
Apply rules for policies with multiple sources or modes to control the actual policy definition and associated policy parameter.
Select the source of cost data for the policies from a set of DDM tables and other options.
Select the costs to be included.
In some cases, select the method by which costs are calculated.

Advanced policy & constraint generation includes four nodes controlling the generation of specific policies:

Customer Lanes - Use this node to define Customer Sourcing Policies, Transportation Policies with customers as destinations, and Flow Constraints with customers as destinations.
Site Lanes - Use this node to define Site Sourcing Policies, Transportation Policies with sites as destinations, and Flow Constraints with sites as destinations.
Production - Use this node to define Production Policies.
Inventory - Use this node to define Inventory Policies.

Within each of the nodes, you have steps to define:

Capabilities - Select the source of the policies and apply any rules to control how the policies are generated.
Costs - Select the source of the cost data, which costs are included and cost calculations where applicable.

Using advanced policy & constraint generation

Click on the Policies & Constraints node. By default, "Do not generate Policies & Constraints" is selected.
Select Advanced Policy & Constraint Generation. Once you select this option, there are four child nodes available under Policies & Constraints.
Use Next and Back or the left hand navigation tree to navigate through these nodes to define policy generation: